Cover Design – Rebooting Short Change

When I made the original cover for Short Change, I never intended to use it as a placeholder. I meant it to be final…more or less. Heck, I put a lot of time into it, but over time and as the series and ideas progressed, I came to realize that the OG cover wasn’t quite capturing the spirit of the series. It wasn’t until being almost finished with the second in the series that I knew it for a fact.

Now I, and many other indie authors as well, realize that no cover is going to be just the way I want it, but there’s a stark contrast between a cover that is ‘off’ and a cover that is ‘far off’ and I’d rather have the former than the latter if I could help it. My skills and assets may be limited, but this was the moment to push for something I really wanted.

The inspiration for the Resonance Saga was old school comic books and two bit super heroes, so I did some heavy research into comic book style rendering. To what extent could I take a picture and make it look like something out of a comic book?

Turned out, there were a good deal of tutorials online that not only worked with Photoshop, but also other dime store paint programs as well. Like most of my covers, I did the work for this one in paint.net.

I knew I had to have a model for this piece, but finding a good model with free assets was a daunting task. Still, I had downloaded so many from the months back, that I managed to find a good looking piece. In fact, the male model had all the right elements. He looked young and he was wearing long jeans and he carried a backpack. Something in the back of my mind clicked and I told myself that I had to use this one.

So, first, I removed all of the debris around the character. Normally, I’d recommend against this, but I wasn’t going to be planting him into another realistic scene and that background definitely wasn’t working.

After removing the simple house background, I converted the image to a pencil sketch through a nifty layer process and changed the smooth gradients of the original colored image to something more cell shaded. Smashed them together and we got an inked cartoon figure. Overlay a newsprint layer on top and it was as if he came straight from a comic book.

One more thing, I turned the blues in his shirt and jeans to browns. Seemed like a good fit because of the color of the title text. Speaking of which, I added the title text by the model’s feet and stamped my author name to the backpack. Seemed like it fit it fairly well, so I went with it.

Two steps left. Next, I decided to fit in the coin motif. I strategically spared some space on the side of the cover that didn’t seem to be doing much, so I placed three coins over there. A French Franc, a Yen and a Penny. In the original cover, I couldn’t make any more than one coin work, but since I was starting over from scratch, I figured I’d give it another shot and I think they worked well for this piece.

It was still missing something, though. Last step. It needed something that really spoke comic book. What were comic books comprised of? Panels, I thought! So, I rendered a white panel border with black outlines around the original image, then re-sized it back to 6 x 9 and this final image was what I created.

Granted, there are still some aspects that may need resolving. I can think of a few off the top of my head, so for the moment, this isn’t the official cover of Short Change, but I do intend to fine tune this piece into a finished cover over the next few weeks…in between writing Steel Soldier. If all goes well, I’ll use this knowledge to manufacture the cover for the second book too.

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Published by Brett P. S.

Brett (1986) was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut and is an author of short fiction and serialized stories who teaches game design at Lake Land College and writes about Science Fiction & Super Heroes.
Brett Graduated from Lake Land College with an Associates Degree and a Certificate in Game Development. He graduated from Eastern Illinois University in 2015 with a Bachelors in Education and currently teaches Indie Game Development at Lake Land College.
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